Will a salt mine in Gorleben become Germanys permanent nuclear waste dump?
After a 10-year moratorium on research on the project, the government in Berlin is preparing to resume work. It will likely still take years before the site is approved for storage. Spiegel Online took a peek inside a mine that has been the source of protests for years. Few would expect the gray-haired gentleman standing at the barbed wire fence to offer much by way of compromise. “I have been challenging this from the very beginning,” says a calm but firm Andreas Graf von Bernstorff. The count, also his family’s patriarch and the head of Gartow Palace in the town of the same name in the western German state of Lower Saxony, has been fighting this battle for more than three decades. The man, educated in forestry, has been wrangling with the possibility that the salt dome in nearby Gorleben could one day be filled in with nuclear waste. Large salt reserves located directly at the site where the German government is conducting feasiblity research for the potential Gorleben nuclear wast r
